The original striped colouring of the Bays and Duns never developed in Western Europe with its climate of cloudy skies and verdant pastures. [Sidenote: The white horse] THE WHITE HORSE. Now let us study the conditions following the Ice Age in Southern Russia. Here the Dun horse has a white coat for sunny snowy winters. Rumour says that foals are not born white, and it must be remembered that snowy winters are recent even as grassy plains. This whiteness is not, like the summer colouring, a paint issued by the body to tint {35} the hair, but a mere absence of any colouring matter. It is as though the animal saved his stores to paint his inside to a warm red during the cold season instead of wasting it in mere vanity upon his outer clothing. At the same time nothing could be more reasonable than a white coat for concealment against a snowy background. Hares, Eskimo, and lots of other tribes are most particular in this matter, and among the best people of all snowy regions a white suit is the correct mode for winter. It may be that some tribes of ponies neglected to change in the spring, and so became conspicuous in summer, a fatal error where there are wolves about. These were not likely to prosper and raise children except under man's protection, so one suspects that white coats for summer wear date only from the human period. Men had a feeling, too, that the white horse was so beautiful that he must be sacred, a special gift of the gods. Without any special merit, being indeed of lower stamina and endurance than any other horses, the white stock were favoured by breeders. Left to themselves, they would die out rapidly in any sunny climate. One notes, however, that the Persian wild ass has a silvery white coat, the hue of his native desert. There are many animals whose {36} dark hair is white at the tips, so that they are really brunettes who masquerade as blondes. [Sidenote: Bearded horses] BEARDED HORSES. The ancient horse-eating artist-savages of France have left us portraits of ponies strongly bearded under the lower jaw. In the earliest portrait we have of the Celtic pony (Ewart), Odin's eight-legged Sleipnir shows the coarse bearded cut of jaw. The Celtic pony types are bearded to the northward, clean-shaven towards the southward parts of their wide range. The Prejevalski, who is the Tarpan of Asia, is slightly bearded. So is the Kiang or wild ass of Asia. One finds the beard bristles in all the northern breeds of horses, not in the desert stocks to the south. Why then should northern horses want to grow a beard?